Cisco announced Cisco Tetration Analytics, a platform designed to help customers gain visibility across everything in the data centre in real time– every packet, every flow, every speed. Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers telemetry from hardware and software sensors, and then analyses the information using advanced machine learning techniques. Tetration addresses critical data centre operations such as policy compliance, application forensics, and the move to a whitelist security model. Through continuous monitoring, analysis, and reporting, the Tetration Analytics platform provides IT managers with a deep understanding of the data centre that will dramatically simplify operational reliability, zero-trust operations and application migrations to SDN solutions and the cloud.
“Gaining much deeper visibility into the data centre and automating actionable analysis across a company’s infrastructure marks a critical technology advancement in building secure digital business models like cloud, mobile and IoT,” said Mike Weston, Vice President, Cisco Middle East. “We believe the insights we gain from applications and the data centre overall will enhance existing software solutions and drive the future development of new advanced software that will improve business operations, efficiency and customer experiences.”
With Cisco Tetration Analytics, organisations can:
- Understand what applications are dependent on each other throughout their data centre and into the cloud
- Move from reactive to proactive: make informed operational decisions and validate the effect of policy changes before they are implemented
- Search across billions of flows in less than a second using Tetration’s forensics search engine and user interface
- Continuously monitor application behaviour to quickly identify any deviation in communication patterns
The challenge
There is currently no single tool designed to collect consistent telemetry across the entire data centre and analyse large volumes of data in real time, at scale. Up till now, organisations have performed fragmented tasks without the correlation necessary to address operational issues comprehensively. As a result, these complex, slow and disjointed tools are costly in terms of time, money and lost opportunity. IT managers today are hampered by a lack of visibility and knowledge.
- They lack pervasive visibility into data centre infrastructure and how applications are interacting, which results in operational challenges.
- They are unable to migrate applications to the cloud or set up a disaster recovery site effectively with precision and speed.
- They’re unable to adopt a zero trust model because they lack the critical information and resources to implement or maintain it.
Cisco Tetration Analytics platform
Tetration is designed to help enable visibility across the data centre using either server software sensors that require very low overhead, network hardware sensors that monitor packet-by-packet meta data, or both combined for the most complete solution. Tetration executes advanced data centre analytics in real time and presents actionable analysis with easy to understand visuals. Tetration delivers information critical for data centre operations, such as: application insights, automated white list policy recommendations, policy simulation and impact analysis, compliance management, and network flow forensics. Specifically, Tetration can:
- Model a change before it’s executed to understand the impact on applications to enable informed operational decisions;
- Validate that policy changes have actually been applied and taken full effect;
- Do real-time and historical policy simulation – replay what happened in the network at any time, with long term data storage capabilities.
How it works
Software sensors are installed on end hosts: either virtual machine or bare metal servers. In the first Tetration release, software sensors support Linux and Windows server hosts, while hardware sensors are embedded in the ASICs of Cisco Nexus 9200-X and Nexus 9300-EX network switches to collect flow data at line rate from all the ports. A single Tetration appliance will monitor up to one million unique flows per second. Both software and hardware sensors communicate the flow information in real time to the Tetration Analytics platform. The platform can be installed in any data centre with any servers and any network switches.
The Tetration platform is a “one-touch” appliance: the servers and switches are prewired and the software is pre-installed. Available in July 2016, the first Tetration platform will be a full rack appliance that is deployed on-premise at the customer’s data centre.
